Gray Lady Down Read online

  The rest of the media took notice. Time magazine wrote of “Tarting Up the Gray Lady of 43rd St.” and likened the Times’ hip affections to “a grandmother squeezing into neon biking shorts after everyone else has moved on to black skirts.” Sulzberger Jr. struck a pose, expressing pleasure at the reaction. At a dinner, a fellow guest who lamented the passing of hard news was informed by Sulzberger that he was an anachronistic “child of the fifties.” At another public function, Arthur Jr. told a crowd of people that alienating older white male readers meant “we’re doing something right,” and if they were not complaining, “it would be an indication that we were not succeeding.”

  Styles of the Times eventually tanked, at least in its first incarnation. So many of the original advertisers defected that the Times had to give away ad space. Moss was reassigned to the Sunday magazine, importing a similar sensibility to a long-sturdy feature section that had once been a central forum for debate of the most important domestic and international issues. Soon the magazine featured photo shoots of grown women dressed as little girls, evocative of “kiddie porn,” along with stories about the market in Nazi memorabilia, including items made from human skin, and a Fourth of July photo-illustration of a man with his pants down sitting on an outdoor latrine, waving an American flag in one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other. Sulzberger Jr. backed Moss. But as Tifft and Jones relate it in The Trust, when the magazine ran a photograph of a naked Japanese actress bound with ropes for a film to be made for “Prisoner Productions,” Sulzberger Jr. reached his limit. He sent an angry memo to the magazine’s top editor, Jack Rosenthal, ordered Frankel to publish an editor’s note apologizing for the picture, and “conspicuously” copied his father, even though he was retired.

  Besides diluting the paper’s overall gravitas, the push for softer, hipper journalism required an influx of journalists with far less hard-news experience; it called for grad-school-educated “specialists” in popular culture, consumerism and trendy esoterica. Fluff-ball features on junk culture and other trivia like “the return of tight jeans” and “micro plastic surgery,” amid a crush of television-obsessed reports and analysis, caused serious readers of the Times to roll their eyes and cancel their subscriptions. The paper, according to the New York Observer’s Michael Thomas, kept “plumbing the depths of trivialization.”

  The fact that the soft news was restricted to the back sections of the paper at first provided a defense. But as editors tried to make the front news section more hip, the paper’s decline in seriousness came increasingly under attack. The barbs were particularly fierce after the Times published a front-page report echoing salacious, uncorroborated details from a Kitty Kelly biography of Nancy Reagan alleging that she had had an affair with Frank Sinatra. Controversy about slipping standards erupted again a short while later when the Times ran another dubious front-page story about rape allegations against a Kennedy cousin, William Smith, which named Smith’s alleged victim, Patricia Bowman, and offered up insinuations about her personal life and sexual past. Many critics read the lurid piece as a classic example of blaming the victim that sprang from a pre-feminist era. Women staffers at the Times circulated a petition and secured a meeting with Frankel in the Times auditorium, where three hundred staff members put him up against the wall. “How could you say that woman was a whore?” one staffer wanted to know.

  Sulzberger Jr. regarded such unpleasant experiences as road bumps on the way to putting his personal mark on the editorial voice of his paper and bringing it into the new age. One of the first moves he made was to hire Howell Raines as editorial page editor. Unlike his father, who had tried to mute the editorial page’s stridency, Arthur Jr. wanted to make it more outspoken, edited by someone who reflected his own taste for confrontation and countercultural values.

  Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Raines had sat on the sidelines during the mid-sixties civil rights demonstrations there, leaving him with a lifelong sense of Southern guilt and a determination never again to shrink from declaring his beliefs and opinions. Embracing a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision, he once declared that “Every Southerner must choose between two psychic roads, the road of racism or the road of brotherhood.” According to Tifft and Jones, Arthur Jr. saw in the passionate Raines “a kindred spirit, a contrarian whose values had taken shape during the sixties, who viewed the world as a moral battleground, who relished intellectual combat, and who wasn’t shy about expressing his convictions in muscular unequivocal language.”

  Under Raines, the editorial page assumed a caustic, take-no-prisoners tone reminiscent of the days of the ultra-liberal John Oakes. The page also became a platform for the new publisher’s preoccupations, focusing, sometimes obsessively, on diversity, gay rights, feminism, the history of racial guilt and other fixations of the cultural left.

  Some of the editorial writers whom Raines inherited were not happy with the change, contending that there was more “shrill braying” than “sound argumentation” on the page. Now in retirement, even Max Frankel wrote that “mere invective is no substitute for vigor and verve.” Timothy Noah of Slate said that Raines’ editorial page “routinely attempts to hide simpleminded logic behind lapidary prose and promiscuous contempt.” Michael Tomasky, then at New York magazine, accused him of “using the country’s most important newspaper as his personal soapbox.”

  Sulzberger also made Raines part of an informal “brain-trust,” composed of the executive editor and selected senior corporate managers, to plan the paper’s future. This gave Raines power and influence over other parts of the Times that no other editorial page editor ever had. It also had the effect of weakening the firewall between news and opinion, particularly on the publisher’s pet issues, especially that of diversity.

  Sulzberger Jr.’s effort to reinvigorate the editorial page also involved a substantial change among op-ed columnists. Packing the roster with his personal and political favorites, he added Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert to Anna Quindlen, who had secured her place several years earlier when Arthur Jr. was deputy publisher and had become an important ally. According to a growing cadre of Times critics, the problem was not that Sulzberger Jr. hired liberal op-ed columnists, but that he hired them in a vastly disproportionate ratio to conservative voices. At one point after Sulzberger abruptly relieved Abe Rosenthal of his column in 1999, William Safire was the only conservative on the op-ed page. Sulzberger’s choices were also markedly narrow in journalistic experience. Of the four aforementioned, none had spent any time as a foreign correspondent, and the national-level reporting experience of the group as a whole was limited. It seemed that Arthur Jr. chose most of his columnists on the basis of how much they agreed with his own sixties-era values and with the P.C. agenda he embraced.

  Had Sulzberger merely allowed Raines to sharpen the combative edge of the editorial page, and turned the op-ed page into a mirror of his liberal politics and self-consciously iconoclastic values, his innovations might have been defensible. But he also initiated changes that encouraged the infiltration of opinion into the news pages. He did so chiefly by increasing the number of columnists on the inside pages; by relaxing or ignoring rules that had barred television, film, theater and literary critics from injecting their politics into reviews; by increasing the amount of space devoted to news analysis and other forms of explanatory journalism; and by expanding the importance of popular culture in the news mix.

  Up until well into the 1960s the Times had had very few columnists; by the early 2000s there were four dozen, scattered throughout the paper. In late 2009, there were eighteen “cultural critics” alone, courtesy of the expanded coverage of popular culture. Had someone like Abe Rosenthal been there to keep a weather eye out for critics using their perch to introduce political or social commentary into what were supposed to be “straight” reviews, the boost in the number of critics and “inside” columnists would not have been such a problem. But the new Timesmen and Timeswomen were encouraged to write with “v
oice.” Given the ideological proclivities of the people hired by Sulzberger, that meant a liberal voice as well as political posturing.

  And so, writing about Goodnight and Good Luck in his 2006 Oscar predictions column, David Carr called the film “A well crafted look at a time in American history when anything less than complete fealty to the republic was seen as treason, which sounds familiar to some movie goers.” In a review of Sophie Stoll (2006), a World War II German period film about the fate of civil liberties under the Nazis, Stephen Holden said, “It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?” Holden also hailed Oliver Stone’s documentary about Hugo Chavez (2010) for depicting the anti-American Venezuelan dictator as “a rough-hewn but good-hearted man of the people whose bullheaded determination is softened by a sense of humor.” The television critic Anita Gates lauded a British show called Cracker for providing “the punch of confirmation that much of the rest of the world may indeed despise the United States for what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.” The choreographer Bill T. Jones’ performance piece Blind Date (2005) was praised by Ginia Bellafante for questioning “the expediency of war,” for reflecting on “limited opportunities for the urban poor,” and for remarking on “the centrality of sexual moralism to the Republican agenda.”

  The biggest erosion of the wall between news and opinion, however, came in the elevation of Howell Raines to the position of executive editor in 2001. The Times now practically dropped the pretense of objective reporting altogether, opting for crusading zeal and advocacy on a level heretofore unseen in the paper. Besides bringing dogmatic political opinions to the job, Raines blurred the line between news and opinion by putting editorial department staff into key newsroom positions. For example, he made the columnist Frank Rich an associate editor, with responsibilities for cultural coverage. Rich had been moved from the op-ed page to the Sunday Arts section, then back to the op-ed page on Sundays with a much bigger platform—usually at least half a page. What the new position meant was that Rich was not only opining on various subjects linking culture and politics, but also determining how the Times was covering arts and culture.

  Robert Samuelson of Newsweek commented on the changes that came to the Times with Howell Raines’ promotion:Every editor and reporter holds private views. The difference is that Raines’ opinions are now highly public. His [editorial page] was pro choice, pro gun control, and pro campaign finance reform.... Does anyone believe that, in his new job, Raines will instantly purge himself of these and other views? And because they are so public, Raines’ positions compromise the Times’ ability to act and appear fair-minded. Many critics already believe that the news columns of the Times are animated—and distorted—by the same values as its editorials. Making the chief of the editorial page the chief of the news columns will not quiet those suspicions.

  Sulzberger tried to dismiss such concerns. “A great journalist knows the difference between those two roles. Howell is certainly a great journalist,” he insisted. But as Raines’ tenure proceeded, it would become abundantly clear that Samuelson’s prediction was right.

  three

  Bullets over Arthur Jr.

  Abe Rosenthal’s funeral in 2006 became an occasion for nostalgia over the death of the Times’ golden days, a recessional for the paper’s transition from the voice of America to an increasingly self-righteous, and politically correct, left-liberal publication. It also became a moment for pause when the effects of young Arthur’s fifteen-year reign could be evaluated.

  It was not a pretty picture. In a relatively few years, a paper that had been known as the gold standard of American journalism had been tarnished by a string of embarrassing incidents, casting it in the harshest of spotlights, putting its credibility and even its patriotism on the line. Its newsroom had been accused of hypocrisy, corruption, ineptitude, ethical misconduct, fraud, plagiarism, credulousness and, most seriously, ideological bias. The business side was equally under siege, and its board—stacked with Sulzbergers—had presided over a plummeting of stock value to half what it had been in 2002, with advertising revenues in free fall. This steady parade of embarrassing lowlights, where the Times had become the focus of the news instead of merely the bearer of it, had revealed cracks in its foundations and made it a target for public anger and derision—as well as a possible candidate for a corporate takeover.

  Every time one of these incidents occurred, the Times and its partisan defenders—led by Arthur Jr. himself—had tried to depict it as an isolated case, refusing to acknowledge any pattern. But in aggregate these regularly occurring scandals and other expressions of journalistic dysfunction paint a damning portrait of an institution stumbling through chaos of its own making. As Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff would write in May 2008, “The ever growing list of its own journalistic missteps, blunders, and offenses threatens to become one of the things the Times most stands for: putting its foot in it. And the expectation, both within the Times and among those who obsessively watch it, is that there is always some further black eye, calumny, screw-up, or remarkable instance of tone-deafness on the horizon.”

  The list of major stumbles on the Times’ downward path reads like a bill of particulars against the Sulzberger Jr. years, a chronicle of decline unparalleled in modern American media history.

  The Blair Affair. It began in the spring of 2003 with revelations that one of the paper’s rising African American reporters, Jayson Blair, had plagiarized and fabricated material in scores of articles over a four-year period, including such high-profile stories as the Washington D.C. sniper case in 2002, and U.S. casualties from the first months of the Iraq War in 2003. It ended when Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who had pledged in the pages of his own paper that there would be no newsroom scapegoats, fired his close friend and handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines, as well as the managing editor, Gerald Boyd, the highest-ranking black ever in the newsroom. Facing a staff rebellion, public humiliation and a charge of bureaucratic disarray, Sulzberger admitted that the plagiarism scandal was “the low point in the paper’s 150 year history.”

  The depressing story was told in the Times’ own 14,000-word reconstruction of the Blair fiasco, headlined “Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception.” This inquiry declared that Blair had “violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth.” It said that 36 of 73 articles Blair had written since he started to get national reporting assignments in October of the previous year had serious problems.

  Blair, who had been at the Times for almost five years and had racked up an inordinate record of “corrections,” had used his cell phone, his laptop and access to databases, particularly photo databases, to “blur his true whereabouts” as he “fabricated comments,” “concocted scenes,” “lifted details from other newspapers and wire services” and “selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen something” in order to write falsely about some of the most “emotionally charged moments in recent history.” While Blair created the impression that he was emailing his editors from the field, on key stories he was sending these transmissions from his Brooklyn apartment or from another floor in the Times building. The report admitted that one of Blair’s biggest “scoops” on the D.C. sniper case, which involved a local police station confession by John Allen Muhammad that was allegedly cut short by turf-conscious U.S. attorneys, had five anonymous sources—all fake. Law-enforcement beat reporters in the Washington bureau had complained, but were ignored.

  Touching on the combustible issue of racial preferences as a factor in Blair’s rise, the report explained that he had joined the Times through a minority-only internship and then was promoted to full-time reporter in January 2001, and that his immediate supervisor, Jonathan Landman, the Metro editor, objected but ultimately deferred to the paper’s “commitment to diversity.” Landman did warn his higher-ups that editors had to “stop Jayson from writing for the Times,” but that memo had little effect. Although the Times denied
any connection between Blair and the broader issue of affirmative action, such a conclusion was hard to get around. The recently retired Times columnist William Safire said, “Apparently, this 27-year-old was given too many second chances by editors eager for this ambitious black journalist to succeed.”

  As part of its lacerating self-inquiry, the paper held a special off-site “town meeting” of newsroom employees to address the worsening staff morale and many still-unanswered questions. Hundreds of Times newsroom personnel filed down the sidewalk into a rented Broadway movie theater in what one tabloid reporter standing next to me on-scene called “the world’s longest perp walk.” Nearby, a prankster costumed as “Baghdad Bob,” the infamously prevaricating former spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Information, held up a sign that said “New York Times Reporter: Will Lie for Food.”

  The meeting, which Raines would later call “a disaster,” began with an odd statement from Arthur Jr.: “If we had done this [handling the Blair fiasco] right, we would not be here today. We didn’t do this right. We regret that deeply. It sucks.” From here, the meeting quickly degenerated into tense, angry, profanity-laced accusations. Raines and his deputies, one editor charged, had lost “the confidence of much of the newsroom.”

  To the surprise of many, Raines admitted that Blair had been a beneficiary of racial favoritism. “Where I come from, when it comes to principles on race, you have to pick a ditch to die in,” Raines intoned in his best Southern drawl. “And let it come rough or smooth, you’ll find me in the trenches for justice. Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously,” he continued. “But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.” Raines also said he had no intention of stepping down voluntarily. To which Sulzberger chimed, “If he were to offer his resignation, I would not accept it.”